Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  Mess Officer conferred with three lieutenants at a nearby table. “What can we do?” he asked mournfully. “He's doing this just to bug me. There's no regulation against eating toothpaste.”

  “There's regulations against an officer acting like a gawd-damned billy goat,” said one lieutenant. Call the S. P.'s and have him arrested. We'll think of something to charge him with.”

  As it turned out, Plucky was charged with conduct unbecoming an officer and was confined to quarters for thirty days. His sentence weighed on him lightly. Too lightly for an incorrigible whoremonger, thought Mess Officer, and on the occasion when he was officer of the deck, he pulled a surprise 11 P.M. inspection of Purcell's room, fully expecting to find a bar girl or two stashed away in the ensign's bunk. He found no women. But he did find several ounces of Acapulco gold, a smokable delicacy for which Plucky had acquired a taste while south of the border. Mess Officer's joy in his discovery was tempered, however, by the fact that before he could get to a phone to report it, he had half a loaf of stale raisin bread stuffed down his throat.

  II

  “To a son of the nobility, three fields of endeavor are open,” Plucky reminded himself. “These are: Military, religion and politics. The military has failed me. There is no public office to which I could realistically aspire. As for religion, that is a subject which holds a maximum of fascination for me, but I fear the seminary gates would be bolted at the earliest signal of my approach.”

  He sat down upon his duffel bag and with his dishonorable discharge lit a Havana cigar. It was nearly dark and he was giving up hope of hitching a ride. “There is, however, one occupation where politics, the military and religion overlap; which embodies prominent features of all three.” He blew a target of concentric smoke rings, then threw his stogy over a palm tree. Lugged his suitcase and began to trudge. In the general direction of the Pacific Ocean. Despite (or because of) six months in the brig, he was in good condition and prepared, if necessary, to walk all the way. “But,” he vowed, “I'm blindfolding myself for eight hundred of those three thousand miles so as to shut out the Middle West.”

  And on that note of acute discernment and with no small sense of fatalism, Plucky Purcell embarked upon a life of crime.

  III

  Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective. Man's peculiarly ambivalent psyche permits him to operate simultaneously according to two opposing codes. There is the code which he professes to live by, and there is the code to whose standards he actually does adhere. The deceit is so ingrained and subtle that most men truly are unaware of it, although to psychologists, philosophers and the like, it is no news at all.

  Man is not as good as he thinks he is. (Nor as bad, for that matter, but let's not complicate things.) He has certain needs, demands certain services which in reality are probably healthly and natural, but to which in time's passage and as a result of odd quirks in his ethos, he has ascribed (or allowed his religious leaders—often guilt-warped, psychopathic misfits—to ascribe) negative values. In the queerest of paradoxical metamorphoses, honest desires change into taboos.

  To simply “say” that a desire is immoral—or, resorting to even flimsier abstraction, to deem the fulfillment of a desire illegal—does not eliminate the desire. It does not eliminate anything except straightforwardness. It creates, in addition to a climate of deception, an underworld into which men “descend” in order to partake of Code B services not permitted under the provisions of Code A. Society hires armed goons to force itself to conform to Code A, but a greater sum of money is spent each year in the surreptitious enjoyment of the services provided by Code B. The underworld persists because society needs it, insists upon it, supports it (at the same time that it denies and persecutes it, of course).

  But enough of that. Let's simply say that according to Code A, Plucky Purcell—drug dealer and abortionist's agent—is a criminal. Under the reality of Code B, however, he is dutifully serving the interests of his fellow man.

  IV

  Although there is probably no such thing as a “typical” citizen of the underworld, Purcell would not conform to any man's conception of the ordinary criminal. For one thing, he doesn't look like a dealer. The genetic system responsible for his physique must have plagiarized openly from the Belvedere Apollo. His face, too, is beautiful, although its classical composition is inclined to crumble when he indulges his goofy grin. Man, Purcell has a grin like the beer barrel polka. A ding-dong daddy grin. A Brooklyn Dodger grin. A grin you could wear to a Polish wedding. His smile walks in in woolly socks and suspenders and asks to borrow the funny papers. You could trap rabbits with it. Teeth line up inside it like cartridges in a Mexican bandit's gunbelt. It is the skunk in his rosebush, the crack in his cathedral.

  Purcell's methods are as atypical as his looks. He caters, for example, to an exclusive clientele: his services are available only to artists. Now if Plucky has ever in his life suffered a creative impulse, he either successfully suppressed it or satisfied it under cover of darkness. There are no indications that he is a frustrated artist. Yet, for reasons which his friends have never adequately explored, he attached himself to a wide circle of painters, sculptors, film makers and poets. In fact, among artists on both coasts of America there is hardly a more familiar face. Our most rigorous and challenging geniuses have tasted his dope; their girl friends, models and wives have availed themselves of his medical connections. Moreover, he has been a bodyguard to artists in peril, a baby-sitter for those who did not take advantage of his clinical references and a cherished dinner guest of the great and the obscure. (Although it did not make the papers, a Pulitzer Prize winner once showed up to go his bail.) Did Purcell, convinced of artists' traditional-mythical appetites for sin, and aware, too, of their insulation and intelligence, merely see in the creative minority a safe and steady market for his wares? Or did he recognize that despite the attention paid art today (though actually it is “culture” and not art that draw the light), despite the historically proven importance of the artist to society, artists are still second-class citizens who might need to be served and protected by an agent sensitive to their socio-economic deprivations and emotional demands? Or, is the Mad Pluck genuinely, personally moved by artisthood, its ideas and its works? Well, whatever.

  Perhaps the most astonishing characteristic of Plucky's criminal career is the ethics with which he practices it. His fees are more than fair: he seeks to make a living, not a killing. The times are not rare when a girl in trouble without adequate funds has had her surgery bill paid out of Plucky's own pocket. Lest he sound the altruist he is not, however, it should be disclosed that he usually required the girl to share a weekend with him inspecting ceilings in some modest hotel. While he is untainted by monetary greed it cannot be denied that he is a pig for pussy.

  There is more to say in Purcell's behalf. He does not escort women to abattoirs—he represents trained physicians who are skilled and compassionate and who wash their hands before and after. As for drugs, he carries a line of the most reliable marijuana and hashish. To a client whom he feels is sound enough to handle it, he also will sell LSD, mescaline, STP, DMT or psilocybin. He does not deal in hard narcotics or amphetamines. He does not tolerate those who do. When he meets pushers of smack and speed, as he does not infrequently in his profession, he attempts to convince them that it is a vile and murderous act to peddle chemicals which can ultimately only destroy their imbibers. If his pleas fail, he batters heads and breaks bones. That makes him unpopular with racketeers and police alike.

  Try as they might, neither the Mafia nor the police nor any combination thereof can win the respect of Plucky Purcell. It is possible that Plucky is narrow-minded where mobsters and cops are concerned. Possibly, he does not try to understand the reasons for their boorish manners, their mutual greed, their artless authority. Something in his nature has always been intolerant of authority, especially when it is violently imposed upon those who seem neither to need it nor
want it—as is usually the case. Rash boy, his conscience does not even twitch when in his small-fry way he upsets the delicate symbiotic relationship between organized crime and organized crime-prevention. He is insensitive to the losses his prejudices have inflicted upon the international heroin cartel, the embarrassment his interference has caused the police. And as if to add insult to injury, he is always taking part in social protests, marching in demonstrations and otherwise exercising his moral and constitutional rights in a manner that cannot be helpful to the establishment, not the “legal” establishment or the “illegal” one. Thus, with officialdom he is less popular than a tough cut of beef. In fact, Purcell, long before Amanda and John Paul's marriage, had become so hot that he was obliged to spend four to six months each year outside of his chosen profession. During the cooling-off periods he would ship out as a merchant seaman, labor as a cowboy in Texas or Wyoming, enlist as a smoke jumper in Montana, fly crop-dusting duty in California (he has maintained his enthusiasm for flying and is a licensed pilot) or cut timber in the Great Northwest. While he shares Amanda's disdain for tree-exploiters, it is in the big woods that he feels safest. Logging keeps him in top physical shape, and the pure forest air sweetens his brain and his lungs.

  “If they really decide to do you in, all the trees in Washington and Oregon can't hide you,” a leading painter had warned.

  “Oh, man, I'm only a nuisance,” Plucky answered. “They won't get their Italian loafers muddy to slap a mosquito.” And cranking out his five-pound grin, he grabbed his calked boots and headed for tall timber.

  Bravado aside, however, Purcell would have to admit that Ziller's concern for him was not irrational. Amanda, after she had absorbed his background, joined her husband in his unease. Of course, as the reader might have surmised, neither Syndicate exterminator nor super narcotics sleuth reached Purcell in his hard-labor up-country hideaway. It was an event a bit more startling than a rub-out or arrest that curtailed Plucky's customary epistles to his pals. So startling, in fact, that had Ziller an inkling of it he might have been too amazed to have balled his bride on that gray Skagit afternoon, let alone to have proposed the Babylonain slobber magic which they practiced after supper.

  No. The author exaggerates. It wasn't as startling as all that.

  Amanda went once to a blues club. Her date was Madame Lincoln Rose Goody, who was, as Amanda somewhat innocently discovered, not academic in bed.

  All evening, music or no, an old Negro called the Jelly Man passed among the patrons selling from a tray fresh raspberries, sugar, glass jars and little brown spiders.

  “Jelly Man,” said Amanda, “I can understand the berries and the sugar and the jars. But how did the spiders get in?”

  “Under the door,” answered the benevolent Jelly Man.

  They had two garter snakes and a tsetse fly. And the tsetse fly was not even alive. Hardly a roadside attraction.

  They had a baboon, true enough. But under no circumstances would Ziller assign Mon Cul a role in the menagerie. “As long as my friend's body turns on a pivot of crimson buttocks, as long as his eloquent fangs pierce honeydews and melons, as long as he in wisdom and laughter goes on spinning around the sun, he will not be gawked at, gibbered over and goaded by beings less dignified than he.”

  Ziller's attitude was understood perfectly by Amanda for she had brought her dancing bear to perform with the Indo-Tibetan Circus only to have it choke to death on a handkerchief that some rube in sport tossed into the pen. “But,” she answered, “granting that Mon Cul is a remarkable creature, that he is the elder statesman among monkeys, that his marcescent eyelids have opened upon sights and splendors about which the most romantic among us only dream, granting that, do not all wild animals have dignity? Can we justify caging any beast, subjecting it to the public gape?”

  After some hesitation, John Paul agreed that they could not. He hesitated because he was, after all, a man of the jungle; a man dressed in hides and feathers, a man who had hunted and been hunted in lands where primitive equalities prevail. It was not in Africa (or in India), however, but at the Bronx Zoo that he had been warned of the folly of anthropomorphism. That wolf that paces incessantly in its cage, that panther who sways as if to music behind the metal barricades, we tend to think them unhappy, angry, claustrophobic, in despair because of their confinement, but we're just imposing our own human emotions on animals who are not biologically capable of such feelings. That's what the keeper had said. The soft brown eye-glow of the deer looks sad to us, but that's just the way deer's eyes are built. There are no sad deer, in or out of corrals. Anthropomorphism is a silly deceit. He'd said that, too. Furthermore, he'd claimed that animals are better off in zoos than in their natural habitats. In the wilds, the battle for survival is unrelenting. Hunger follows the animal like a shadow. Thousands of beasts starve each year the world over. What's more, there are predators to escape. And diseases. In the zoo, an animal is safe, well-fed, housed in comfortable temperatures, given medical attention. Why, zoos are almost utopias for the beasts.

  It was a good argument, yet John Paul offered it to Amanda with a minimum of conviction, and when she rejected it he concurred. As unrefined and basic as an animal's emotional equipment may be, it is not insensitive to freedom. Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable. In the cage, even in the “environmental parks” which the better zoos are providing for their charges, a creature is out of harmony with the natural rhythms of organ and earth: it must eat foods out of their regular season; soft living erodes its cunning; it becomes confused about mating and often fails to reproduce; an immense FRUSTRATION overtakes it due to its inability to heed instinctual instructions. Were it capable of choice, surely it would prefer to take its chances “out there” against the odds of hunger and hungry. While suffering is no more glamorous—or even necessary—for animal than for man, and while for the being who is at peace with itself survival may be of trivial concern, still there is something kind of noble in the struggle for survival. Whether meaningful or meaningless, the game of life is there to be played—and the animal in his animal way seems to “know” it and the cage is an offense to what his inner animal voice tells him is right and true.

  Lubricated by this dialogue, Amanda pushed further. “When a man confines an animal in a cage, he assumes ownership of that animal. But an animal is an individual; it cannot be owned. When a man tries to own an individual, whether that individual be another man, an animal or even a tree, he suffers the psychic consequences of an unnatural act. Have you ever watched visitors at a menagerie or zoo—the fools they make of themselves, the way they leer and snigger and vex and demand entertainment and taunt? A caged beast, like an excess of alcohol, reduces man to his most banal dimensions. And he is only slightly better behaved when observing human inmates of prisons and institutions. A creature, human or otherwise, that has had its freedom compromised has been degraded. In a subconscious reaction that combines guilt, fear, and contempt, the keepers of the caged—even the observers of the caged—are degraded themselves. The cage is a double degrader. Any bar, whether concrete or intangible, that stands between a living thing and its liberty is a communicable perversity, dangerous to the sanity of everyone concerned.”

  What had gotten into Amanda? She was never moved to pedantry unless . . . She cocked one ear to listen for the telltale thunderclap. But all she heard was Mon Cul shuffling into the room and up to Ziller's side, where he bowed and scraped and grinned apologetically like some creaky old back-porch nigger. Ziller squatted and met the baboon eye to eye, but Mon Cul backed away with an Uncle Tom one-step, opals of spittle popping in the corners of his obsequious smile.

  “You Judas creep,” scolded Ziller. “You who've lived a life of hedonistic abandon, you would insinuate that I've held you captive? If there is a master in our relationship it is you who has owned me.” The baboon barked uproariously and turned four somersaults. And although
Ziller laughed and said, “You'd better watch your manners or you'll end up in Detroit and you know what happens to baboons there,” he was mired to his cerebral axle in troubled thoughts.

  And over in a corner on a sunflowered pillow, Amanda, too, was subdued as she remembered the thousands of butterflies she had enveloped in her net. “At least,” she thought, “I never once introduced one to chloroform.” Her rationalization only shaded the hues of her shame.

  It was a hell of a way to start a roadside zoo.

  In the absence (perhaps, alas, permanent) of John Paul Ziller, this writer was about an hour ago allowed to look through the missing magician's possessions. After all, the FBI and CIA have rummaged Ziller's and Purcell's belongings so thoroughly there could be little left of intimacy or value. Your correspondent found what he was seeking, however: an English language dictionary. It should be quite useful in the completion of this document and he should have thought of it sooner. Perhaps from here on out the reader will note some improvement in vocabulary, if not in overall what-do-you-call-it.

  Already the author has learned that dawk is just another word for dak, and that dawt is Scottish for daut. What do you make of that?

  "Magnificent!” exclaimed John Paul Ziller, pronouncing the word like he was a Kansas City intellectual describing the Louvre to his sister-in-law who'd called to tell him to bring his vacation slides over some other night because she'd burned the spaghetti sauce and the baby had colic. “Truly wondrous. Appraising it now I feel a bit like Bernard Berenson standing before Michelangelo's 'Temptation,' 'quaffing rare draughts of unadulterated energy' and itching to get his cultivated meathooks on the heroic buttocks of Eve. Though in truth, due to its humility and patience, it's less a Michelangelo than a Renoir: the roundness, the warmth, the rosy delight, the joie de vivre, the casual eroticism, the full and robust charm. It is at once a dramatically overflowing embodiment of the life force and an honest monument to the occasional genius of the plebeian palate."